The outsider

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Peter Huck meets a passionate and moral man driven to write about
what he believes.

Last year, Nicholson Baker was cruising the internet when he
came across a story in The Sydney Morning Herald. American
soldiers at a checkpoint near Karbala had fired at a vehicle,
killing several Iraqi civilians. The dead included two little
girls, their heads blown off.

This horrific vignette was the catalyst for Checkpoint,
Baker's latest fiction, a conversation between two men, Jay and
Ben, in a Washington hotel suite. Jay wants to assassinate
President Bush. Jay's rationale is that by killing Bush he'll save
lives. Ben tries to dissuade him.

Written as a polemic, Checkpoint is full of bile,
voiced by Jay, against the Bush Administration. Bush is a "war
criminal", a "Texas punk" with "drugged-out eyes". Vice-President
Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are "rusted
hulks" and "zombies", who have "fought their way back up out of the
peat bogs where they've been lying". The President's views on
Checkpoint are unknown, but the right has been vitriolic,
with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh fulminating against
Baker before the book's release.

Baker, a quietly spoken, almost donnish figure, is no stranger
to controversy. Reviewing The Fermata, in which an office
worker who can stop time undresses women, Victoria Glendinning
called it "a repellent book", concluding: "Goodbye Nicholson Baker,
goodbye for ever."

The novel, along with Vox (about phone sex and made
infamous after Monica Lewinsky gave the book to President Clinton),
explores sexual obsession and was a bestseller. And Baker was
vilified by librarians after Double Fold took them to task for
trashing newspaper archives and replacing them with microfilm.

Still, writing a book in which a character wants to kill the
president does up the ante. Baker makes it clear he isn't actually
advocating murder - Ben suggests that Jay "rage inward" - and
Checkpoint is hardly an assassin's primer (Jay's weapons
include a boulder of depleted uranium, radio-controlled flying saws
and bullets guaranteed to target Bush after being stored with his
picture in a box). Instead, a close reading of Checkpoint,
like all of Baker's oeuvre, reveals a complex meditation, this time
on Bush's America. "I wanted the reader to think, 'What the hell
did we just do?'," explains Baker, on the phone from his home in
rural Maine. "We've reached a moral checkpoint. The country is now
filled with checkpoints because we've become so fearful. Yet we
have this feeling that we're morally pure. Nobody's looking inside
our mental baggage, asking, 'Have you actually examined the motives
and reasoning behind what we're doing?' "

This moral dimension gives Checkpoint its bite. Baker
is appalled by the Iraq War, and what it reveals about the US (an
early title was Why America Stinks). Besides mourning dead
Iraqis, he also mourns for his country. Baker believes anyone who
supported the war became a participant. As such, his book is "about
guilt and the assigning of responsibility."

"Sometimes I look at the book and feel, 'What was I thinking?"'
he says. "If I went to a bookstore I would feel strange about
carrying this to the counter. Part of it is, if you read the book
you become complicit in something that is in a sense a crime. And
that's what happened in this country. Congress authorised this
goofball to wage war and he waged war. And we all bear some
responsibility for that crime."

Responsibility seems hardwired in Baker, a passionate soul
"compelled to write each book" and prepared to be a critical pariah
with his work. Born into a Quaker family in 1957, he went to an
experimental school, then a music college, before switching to
English literature. Bright, bookish, and somewhat obsessive, he
spent years seeking a literary voice, until he had an epiphany.

"I remember the day," Baker says. "I took a walk - we were
living in North Quincy, Massachusetts - and a saw a chain link
fence and a roll [napkin] that had been run over by a lawnmower and
strewn all over the ground. And I just thought my day's work was to
go home and write about the shadow from that fence. I actually
traced the shadow the fence made on the roll." Baker, who had been
toiling miserably on a conventional murder mystery, had found his
calling.

Each book, says Baker, emerges from a sense of crisis (The
Mezzanine was initially called Desperation, because
Baker feared he would be "washed up" if he hadn't published a novel
by the age of 30). Intriguingly, between each published book, he
tries to write "normal books". "Dickens and Tolstoy are the great
ones. And I wish to God I could do something like that. But you
have to stand before the world as you actually are. And say, 'This
is it. This is all I've got.' "

Part of Baker's appeal is that he doesn't rest on his laurels.
He says he is "still figuring out how to be a writer". Although
best known for his micro-macro style (and Checkpoint
features a striking image of sunlight beaming in from the vastness
of space to illuminate a pinhead), he is also fond of dialogue.
Indeed, the book could conceivably work as a play - prompting a
satirical review by P.J. O'Rourke that compares Jay and Ben's chat
to Waiting for Godot.

On the day that I spoke with Baker, the President called the
Iraq war a "catastrophic success", a disturbingly Orwellian phrase.
Yet while the ghost of 1984 seems to stalk America's
endless "war against terror", Baker sees a chink of sunlight; no
one can police his thoughts. "A man can sit in a room and type out
a book that discusses something this disturbing," he muses, "and
not be carted off to Guantanamo. It's a desperate act on my part to
be proud of something American."